# Target-Augmented Shared Fusion-based Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07391 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07391/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [Towards Multimodal Sarcasm Detection (An _Obviously_ Perfect Paper)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01815/) (2019)
- [Using millions of emoji occurrences to learn any-domain representations for detecting sentiment, emotion and sarcasm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00524/) (2017)
- [Detecting Sarcasm in Multimodal Social Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02289/) (2016)
- [Reasoning with Sarcasm by Reading In-between](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.02856/) (2018)
- [Multi-modal Sarcasm Detection and Humor Classification in Code-mixed Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09984/) (2021)
- [When did you become so smart, oh wise one?! Sarcasm Explanation in Multi-modal Multi-party Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06419/) (2022)
- [R3: Reverse, Retrieve, and Rank for Sarcasm Generation with Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13248/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Convolutional Neural Networks for Matching Image and Sentence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06063/) (2015)
- [Nice perfume. How long did you marinate in it? Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04873/) (2021)
- [Multi-source Semantic Graph-based Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16650/) (2023)
- [Sarcasm SIGN: Interpreting Sarcasm with Sentiment Based Monolingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06836/) (2017)
- [Team QUST at SemEval-2023 Task 3: A Comprehensive Study of Monolingual and Multilingual Approaches for Detecting Online News Genre, Framing and Persuasion Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04190/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Are Emotion and Rhetoric Neurons in LLM? Neuron Recognition and Adaptive Masking for Emotion-Rhetoric Prediction Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17255/) (2026)
- [Towards High-Level Semantic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24082/) (2026)
- [Reading Between the Frames of Multimodal Drivelology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04939/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sarcasm is a linguistic phenomenon that intends to ridicule a target (e.g., entity, event, or person) in an inherent way. Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation (MuSE) aims at revealing the intended irony in a sarcastic post using a natural language explanation. Though important, existing systems overlooked the significance of the target of sarcasm in generating explanations. In this paper, we propose a Target-aUgmented shaRed fusion-Based sarcasm explanatiOn model, aka. TURBO. We design a novel shared-fusion mechanism to leverage the inter-modality relationships between an image and its caption. TURBO assumes the target of the sarcasm and guides the multimodal shared fusion mechanism in learning intricacies of the intended irony for explanations. We evaluate our proposed TURBO model on the MORE+ dataset. Comparison against multiple baselines and state-of-the-art models signifies the performance improvement of TURBO by an average margin of +3.3%. Moreover, we explore LLMs in zero and one-shot settings for our task and observe that LLM-generated explanation, though remarkable, often fails to capture the critical nuances of the sarcasm. Furthermore, we supplement our study with extensive human evaluation on TURBO's generated explanations and find them out to be comparatively better than other systems.